There’s no doubt that working on a story, refining it, editing images and building a brand-new site to showcase your stories to the world is an exhilarating experience.

Sadly, as most travel bloggers discover, it’s extremely anti-climactic. With so much hard work and preparation going into establishing the blog and writing the stories on the road, it can be disheartening to see so few visitors coming to your site.

Unfortunately, the old adage “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply in travel blogging. You need to utilize some marketing skills to get your travel blog out there.

While building a travel blog is a slow and steady process, it’s important to do it as effectively and efficiently as possible, making sure to start with the best web hosting possible.

Simple Techniques for Getting More Visitors

1. Optimizing SEO While Still in the Sandbox

The “Google sandbox” is the term used to refer to how Google penalizes domains registered within the last 3 months in its search results.

There are so many things for the owner of a travel blog to do that many neglect working on SEO during this initial three months because they don’t see the benefit. While it is true that having good SEO will not bring in results during this time, the fact is that Google is still indexing and crawling the site during these three months.

In order for a site owner to truly get the best results at the end of this 90 day period, it’s important that they have had their SEO optimized from the get-go in order to see the biggest returns possible.

2. Networking with Other Bloggers

As many successful travel bloggers know, backlinks are one of the most important aspects of SEO.

As a new blogger, it can be very difficult to obtain backlinks from an authority domain and most attempts to connect with more successful bloggers online will just be seen as an attempt to use them for links.

One of the best methods for building up relationships with other bloggers is to go to local events and have genuine face to face encounters with other travel bloggers.

As more and more links and guest posts are obtained, it becomes easier to approach other bloggers online without being dismissed.

3. Guest Posts (with a Twist)

Almost every article ever written on how to drive more traffic mentions guest posts.

Putting in the effort to obtain the chance to write a post on another blogger's site is good advice. But most successful bloggers are inundated with these requests, and your lack of track record will only push you to the bottom of the pile.

A bit like obtaining backlinks, when bloggers are first starting out, they need to go about things a bit differently. One of the most effective methods for getting guest posts is to simply ask for introductions from other bloggers.

It may seem remarkably simple and a little obvious, but is often something that new bloggers forget to do. It can be embarrassing to ask for help, but many bloggers, if they are already known to the asker, will be more than willing to help.

4. Obsess over Search Console

Many new travel bloggers will spend time looking at their Google Analytics account to see how many visitors they are getting, where they are coming from and what content they are reading.

It’s important to know the behavior of users, but at the beginning stages, it’s more helpful to spend time analyzing results from the Google Search Console rather than analytics data.

A quick look at this information will tell the site owner exactly which search terms are bringing the results, so they can shape their future content to target those keywords and the audience they bring.